One or more aspects of the invention relate generally to creating a website structure, and more specifically, to website structure creation using a free form tool.
The Word Wide Web has been an amazing success in making information available around the world on many different devices with many different form factors. In the beginning, special knowledge, like programming competencies in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) programming, was required in order to make simple web-pages available on a web server. Today, there are toolsets available so that programming novices can also create web-pages. However, in order to design and structure more complex content, a website requires a structure and hierarchy of web-pages. An accompanying useful navigation between different web-pages of a website may also be required so that users are not lost between different web-pages. However, the more the World Wide Web underpins worldwide information exchange and the more large amounts of business transactions—buying and selling—are performed online, the more non-programmers are exposed to the requirement not only to design web-pages, but also more complex structures of websites. However, they are not trained to work with computer based design tools; they are used to working on paper or flip charts and white boards.
New agile design methods to facilitate collaboration between IT (Information Technology) specialists and business oriented people in project teams to design web-pages and underlying website structures at an ever increasing speed—the design thinking method may be named here as an example—often rely on design work, i.e., designing a website structure with pen and paper. Translating such a logical design of a navigation tree of a website into an electronic form requires competencies and time. The multidisciplinary teams would be relieved if a website structure could be translated in an automatic fashion starting from a pen and paper exercise.